Alice Cooper has written a third memoir to set the record straight — or as straight as it can be.
“Oh, there was a time we never would have done this book ’cause we never would have broken the mystique of Alice Cooper,” the shock rock Rock & Roll Hall of Famer tells Billboard about the new Devil On My Shoulder (Da Capo), which publishes on Tuesday (Oct. 6). “I’ve rarely allowed facts to get in the way of telling a good story.” He even acknowledges in the new book’s preface, “I’d go as far as to say I’ve been the most outrageously unreliable interviewee of all time, weaving a tangled web of embellishments and exaggerations as I went along…until even I couldn’t separate fact from fiction.”
But this time, Cooper says, “Now we’re not trying to build a career anymore. I want people to see the fact that, yeah, this band really went through a hell of a lot to finally make it … I don’t mind decorating a story, but 90% of these stories are true.”
The 445-page Devil On My Shoulder follows 1976’s Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper, which he dismisses as “a drunken rant,” and 2007’s Alice Cooper, Golf Monster, which blends biography with his passion for the links but offers a generally more coherent, detailed and trustworthy account. “Nobody really pushed Me, Alice,” he notes. “Nobody pushed Golf Monster. They were kind of OK, and they were fun. But this was the book we actually took a lot of time on. I spent five hours a day with [co-author Daniel Richler] just trying to remember stories and actually admitting that, ‘OK, that might be wrong, but I remember that this did happen — I don’t know exactly how it happened, so I’ll just tell you my version of it.’
“I think any book that you read that’s an autobiography is what probably happened, not really what did happen. If you remember what you said to somebody 50 years ago, I challenge that. The best you can do is (write) what you remember and make it fun, ’cause to me, honestly, that’s what a book like this should be. It should be fun to read.”
Alice vs. Alice
For Devil On My Shoulder, Cooper particularly enjoyed a device suggested by Richler — who also co-wrote Rush bassist Geddy Lee’s best-selling 2023 memoir My Effin’ Life — which was to engage the “real” Cooper (born Vince Furnier) in periodic oral dialogues with the Alice Cooper alter ego he created. The two spar in spirited, quick-paced exchanges dotted throughout the book, with the Cooper character questioning the accuracy of his creator’s tales and the real-life Cooper alternately pushing back or conceding the points, often grudgingly.
“I like the confrontation of Alice and me,” says Cooper, who learned to separate himself from the character after becoming sober during the mid-‘80s, overcoming alcoholism and a near-fatal crack cocaine addiction. “I think it’s a really clever way to do this. One of the reasons I love the title is because, to me, everybody’s got the devil on their shoulder, and he’s always whispering all the wrong things to do. You talk to somebody and they go, ‘I was gonna do this, but all of a sudden I did this, and it was the wrong thing to do.’ Well, that’s the devil on your shoulder, saying, ‘Y’know what? This is the better idea.’ You go ‘Yeah,’ and then you go, ‘Why did I do that?’ That’s the thing that connects everybody.”
Devil On My Shoulder is certainly the most detailed account of Cooper’s “eviloution,” from growing up in Detroit through the original Alice Cooper band’s formation in Phoenix, its time in Los Angeles and subsequent rise to notorious — and often reviled – superstardom with horror-show onstage theatrics and Billboard Hot 100 hits such as “Eighteen,” “School’s Out” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” He leaves some of the legends dangling – maintaining that “I still don’t know who had the chicken” that he threw into the audience at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival in 1969 — while he comes clean about others, including the mundane origins of the Alice Cooper name.
“The real story at the time was not as good as the one that was a like … the reincarnation of the witch and the Ouija board and all of that,” he says. “I just said, ‘Look, it’s a better story.’ What we learned at that point was you didn’t have to (say) it, you just have to not deny it.”
The memoir also details Cooper’s crippling, career-stalling struggles with substance abuse during the late ‘70s and goes into depth about his subsequent re-embrace of Christianity and his current beliefs and practices. “I have no problem with that,” he says. “I think people have this thought that Christianity is worshipping the church, where, really, it’s a one-on-one relationship with Christ, and church is where you meet. It’s something I truly believe — and it doesn’t mean I can’t play Alice to the hilt. It’s easy to turn it on, turn it off; as soon as the curtain comes down, (Alice) is gone.
“I always talk about how, if you go through the Bible, God always chose people that nobody else would have chosen. He always chose what I would call the wrong people. Paul was the one who was in charge of getting rid of Christians, and he ended up being the No. 1 apostle. And (God) chose David, who was the least of the brothers, to be the king of Israel. And then all of a sudden he lets me start the Solid Rock (Foundation, in Arizona) and it really helps teenagers. I was the same guy whose albums were being burned on The 700 Club.
“When I got sober I got straight, and I came back to what I believed. And I didn’t have to give up Alice. Your lifestyle is not what you do on stage. If I did Macbeth it would be the same thing. It’s playing a character.”
Three Albums on the Horizon
Cooper also writes extensively about the original Alice Cooper band, which formed during 1964 as the Earwigs and before splitting up in 1975, in the wake of the Muscle of Love album. Cooper, bassist Dennis Dunaway, guitarist Michael Bruce and drummer Neal Smith reunited for their 1999 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction (guitarist Glen Buxton passed away two years prior) and released a reunion album last year. Cooper took the others’ perspectives into account (Bruce and Dunaway have both published their own memoirs) for Devil On My Shoulder as well.
